Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD

To go along with our recent feature on fungal diseases, we asked Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, chair of molecular microbiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, why Candida auris emerged nearly simultaneously on three continents.

In contrast to viral diseases such as AIDS, bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis, and parasitic diseases such as malaria, most humans do not fear fungal diseases. This lack of concern stems from the fact that invasive fungal diseases are very rare in normal individuals. The high resistance of humans and other mammals to invasive fungal diseases stands in contrast to the fact that fungal pathogens are currently ravaging numerous ecosystems, including dramatic amphibian, salamander and coral reef declines. Fungi are major pathogens of plants, insects, reptiles and amphibians but seldom kill mammalian hosts.